been trimmed, and the sled for the boy and
the doll-carriage for the girl were placed beneath it, she got him to
lie down. When she had made him comfortable she kissed him again, knelt
by his bed and prayed, or rather offered thanks, and he was asleep.

Two hours later the subdued shouts of her babies, the exclamations of
glad surprise that came in stage whispers from the dining-room, woke
her, and she rose from the little couch where she had fallen asleep,
already dressed to begin the day.

It was four o'clock in the afternoon when she called the prodigal. When
he had bathed his feverish face and put on the fresh clothes she had
brought in for him and come into the dining-room, he saw his rosy dreams
of the previous night fulfilled. The messenger and his wife shook hands
with him and wished him a Merry Christmas. His children, all the
children, came and kissed him. His wife was smiling, and the warm blood
leaping from her happy heart actually put color in her cheeks.

As Downs took the chair at the head of the table he bowed his head, the
rest did likewise, and he gave thanks, fervently and without
embarrassment.

THE STUFF THAT STANDS

It was very late in the fifties, and Lincoln and Douglas were engaged in
animated discussion of the burning questions of the time, when Melvin
Jewett journeyed to Bloomington, Illinois, to learn telegraphy.

It was then a new, weird business, and his father advised him not to
fool with it. His college chum said to him, as they chatted together for
the last time before leaving school, that it would be grewsomely lonely
to sit in a dimly lighted flag-station and have that inanimate machine
tick off its talk to him in the sable hush of night; but Jewett was
ambitious. Being earnest, brave, and industrious, he learned rapidly,
and in a few months found himself in charge of a little wooden
way-station as agent, operator, yard-master, and everything else. It was
lonely, but there was no night work. When the shadows came and hung on
the bare walls of his office the spook pictures that had been painted
by his school chum, the young operator went over to the little tavern
for the night.

True, Springdale at that time was not much of a town; but the telegraph
boy had the satisfaction of feeling that he was, by common consent, the
biggest man in the place.

Out in a hayfield, he could see from his window a farmer gazing up at
the humming wire, and the farmer's boy holding his ear